Technoblog

Thursday, September 14, 2006

How to Learn to Program: From PHP to Lisp in 4 easy steps

I taught myself how to program. Having gone through a progression of programming languages, I have found patterns that help me piggy back into more and more interesting types of programming. I started with PHP, moved to object-oriented PHP, and moved to a much cleaner and powerful Ruby. Once you learn Ruby, you are introduced with ideas like iteration by defining a block that is called for every item in a collection. If you like those ideas, you are going to love OCaml. Once you grok OCaml, Lisp becomes nearly second nature. I suggest that if you are in the PHP world and want to flex your muscles, try this progression. One language a year and you should be a Lisp guru in 4 years.

About Me

With almost 8 years of PHP and MySQL development experience, I found Rails in September of 2004 and fell in love. I have experience in a wide range of languages but spend most of my time with Ruby these days.